Is Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite?

The Duck test implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing that subject’s habitual characteristics. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is …

But what if the duck is a crow† who has convinced himself that he is really a swan?

Many accuse Jeremy Corbyn of antisemitism and he certainly has left a trail of webbed footprints behind him. Yet he doesn’t see himself as a Jew Hater‡. So what is the explanation?

The current scandal with Corbyn and the wider Labour party allows Five Minutes for Israel to dive into the thinking of a worldview where being called antisemitic is defamatory but defaming the state of the Jews is practically the sine qua non for acceptance.

If not an antisemite what are some other reasonable explanations? I firmly believe that before determining conspiracy as an explanation we should we should consider incompetence as an adequate explanation*. We should also consider whether the term antisemitism has been diluted to meaningless.

Check out Corbyn’s direct approach to the Jews in the video below.

Note that he never refers to his own statements and actions/inaction, only to a few bad apples in his party. The last two sentences seem to sum up his philosophy and at least give a partial explanation.

Antisemitism, Islamophobia and far-right racism have no place in our society. That is why anti-racism is at the core of our movement.

In his own mind Corbyn can’t be an antisemite. Antisemitism is just another form of racism confined to the far-right. Far-left (as much as I loathe that term) racism, which is the problem he is supposedly explaining away, doesn’t even enter his consciousness. I don’t know if Corbyn has ever quoted the Zionism is Racism libel but I suspect the idea of a left-wing Zionist would leave him flummoxed.

The Party pointedly did decide to omit the IHRA definition that claiming that Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavour” can be considered antisemitism.

Equating antisemitism with Islamophobia and by implication any other form of racism you might like to add reduces the impact of the charge. The whitewashing (It’s all about Shami) Chakrabarti Report that Corbyn commissioned to supposedly investigate antisemitism in the party took the same tack of lumping all instances together. Ironically she recommended that Labour members should resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particular.

I swear this is a screen grab with no alteration.

Show Me Your Friends, I’ll Tell You Who You Are

Jeremy Corbyn called Hamas and Hezbollah his friends but later claimed he regretted it while giving evidence at the home affairs select committee and during a later press conference. That is, he regretted his choice of words. The meeting, not so much.

We should consider entering new terms as Proxy Jew Hatred or Accessory to Jew Hatred to our vocabulary for those who share platforms with people who don’t bother to relabel their antisemitism as criticism of Israel.

However, speaking for the defence (if that’s what I am doing) Corbyn has a long record for supporting just about every dictator and murderer who labelled himself revolutionary.

Hugo Chavez (former Venezuelan president): “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared“.

Irish Republican Army: From 1986 to 1992, Corbyn spoke annually at Sands/Connolly (Bobby and James) commemorations in London to show support for IRA “prisoners of war” and remember the IRA dead.

Does he support Hamas/Hezbollah’s antisemitism or does he just ignore it as he does his other favourites?

Jeremy Corbyn celebrated Passover (in St Peter’s de Beauvoir church in Hackney!) with radical as-a-Jew group Jewdas known for its far-left anti-Zionism, scandalising just about every other Jewish group. Jewdas dismisses talk of antisemitism in party as “faux-outrage greased with hypocrisy and opportunism” that is “the work of cynical manipulations by people whose express loyalty is to the Conservative Party and the right wing of the Labour Party” so undoubtedly he felt at home.

An intriguing question is what was going on in Corbyn’s mind when he decided to accept Jewdas’s (as in Judas?) invitation for a Pessach (Passover) seder. The organisation is an offensive joke. Check out their membership application.

Already facing accusations of antisemitism in his party, did he think attending their mockery of a religious ceremony would reconcile him to the rest of Britain’s Jewish community? Did he think this group was representative of that community? Did he see a group whose opinions, (Israel as “a streaming pile of sewage which needs to be disposed of.”) on Israel came close to his own and that was enough?

Is this just a case of proving he wasn’t antisemitic by finding a tiny, unrepresentative Jewish group and saying, See, there are Jews who agree with me”? Neturei Karta for the far-left? Is he that clever?

Is it possible that a man with ambitions to become Prime Minister has so little sense of irony that he doesn’t realise Jewdas was hardly a serious organisation?

A second attempt to address the wider Jewish community at the Jewish Museum was probably a better idea. It fell through. According to the Independent

“the museum entered talks with Labour having assumed that the organisations had all agreed to attend the event.

However, when museum officials contacted them to discuss it, the groups said they had had no communication with Mr Corbyn’s team and knew nothing about the planned event.”

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”*. Not sure about ‘never’.

† If you didn’t pick up the avian reference.The Corbyn surname may have derived as a nickname for a man with strikingly glossy black hair or for one with a raucous voice, from the Middle English or the Old French “Corbin” Corbun”, raven.
‡ I prefer ‘Jew Hater’ to ‘antisemite’ because it avoids the ridiculous ‘Arabs are also Semites’, claim. By that argument Adolf Hitler was not an antisemite. Please reread I am not an antisemite! Where have all the Jew Haters gone?, one of my earlier efforts. I believe it is still completely relevant.
* Hanlon’s razor

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2 comments

Is Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite? Well, like the Right Honourable Dame Margaret Hodge MP, I personally, am not holding my breath in the expectation that he might actually do – or, maybe even say – something that might lead me to doubt what my instincts, my common sense and my own intelligence inform me is undeniably true.
In my book, someone who considers Israel to be a “racist endeavour” and calls those sworn to the annihilation of that sovereign nation his “friends” and lays wreaths at the graves of the butchers of the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, such an obnoxious person is an antisemite through and through.
But, then again, I’m more than a little biased, maybe even a little bigoted, perhaps?. Maybe I’m a Mossad agent playing dirty tricks against British Labour on behalf of Israel, or, possibly I’m part of some global Jewish conspiracy? Or, perhaps I’m some other kind of invention that Jeremy and his apparatchiks have dreamt up.
I say, Good on you, Dame Margaret! Call an antisemite, an antisemite, I’ve always said. Trouble is, in our day, such a label was a mark of shame, but nowadays there are some that wear it with pride. And, there are other cronies of Jeremy like Ken Livingstone who seem to take delight in causing Jewish people distress and, who if we were living in Cromwellian times might have gone by the name of the Jewbaiter General. Red Ken may have gone from the Labour Party but his voice is still heard from time to time when some ordinary idiot on the street shamefacedly asserts that Hitler and the Religious Jews of Europe both wanted to stop the assimilation of German Jews, and that Hitler, G_d bless him, was a Zionist.
Thankyou, anti-Racist British Labour.